Close Range: Wyoming Stories (incl. Brokeback Mountain)
Annie Proulx, 1999
Simon & Schuster
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780684852225
Summary
Pulitzer Prize winning author Annie Proulx is one of the literary greats of her generation. Bestselling novels like The Shipping News and Postcards have been unmatched successes with critics and readers alike.
Her latest is Close Range , a collection of award-winning tales of the Western frontier, of desolate expanses of land and the vast spaces between people, of love and loss set against the endless sky.
Like The Shipping News, it's sure to make an indelible impression on each of millions of readers. Includes the award-winning stories "The Half-Skinned Steer" and "Brokeback Mountain." (From the publisher.)
"Brokeback Mountain" from this story collection, was adapted to film in 2005, starring jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger. The film won 3 Academy Awards (director, adapted screenplay, and musical score).
Author Bio
• Birth—August 22, 1935
• Where—Norwich, Connecticut, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Vermont; M.A., Sir George Williams University
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, 1994; PEN/Faulkner, 1993
• Currently—lives in Seattle, Washington
Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx did not set out to be a writer. She studied history in school, acquiring both her bachelor's and her master's degrees and abandoning her doctorate only in the face of a pessimistic job market. Something of a free spirit, she married and divorced three times and ended up raising three sons and a daughter single-handedly. She settled in rural Vermont, living in a succession of small towns where she worked as a freelance journalist and spent her free time in the great outdoors, hunting, fishing, and canoeing.
Although she wrote prolifically, most of Proulx's early work was nonfiction. She penned articles on weather, farming, and construction, and contracted for a series of rural "how tos" for magazines like Yankee and Organic Gardening. She also founded the Vershire Behind the Times, a monthly newspaper filled with colorful features and vignettes of small-town Vermont life. All this left little time for fiction, but she averaged a couple of stories a year, nearly all of which were accepted for publication.
Prominent credits in two editions of Best American Short Stories led to the publication in 1988 of Heart Songs and Other Stories, a first collection of Proulx's short fiction. Set in blue-collar New England, these "perfectly pitched stories of mysterious revenges and satisfactions" (the Guardian) received rapturous reviews.
With the encouragement of her publisher, Proulx released her first novel in 1992. The story of a fractured New England farm family, Postcards went on to win the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. She scored an even greater success the following year when her darkly comic Newfoundland set piece, The Shipping News, scooped both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. One year before her 60th birthday, Proulx had become an authentic literary celebrity.
Since then, the author has alternated between short and long fiction, garnering numerous accolades and honors along the way. Giving the lie to the literary adage "write what you know," her curiosity has led her into interesting, unfamiliar territory: Before writing The Shipping News, she made more than seven extended trips to Newfoundland, immersing herself in the culture and speech of its inhabitants; similarly, she weaved staggering amounts of musical arcana into her 1996 novel Accordion Crimes. She is known for her keen powers of observation—passed on, she says, from her mother, an artist and avid naturalist—and for her painstaking research, a holdover from her student days.
In 1994, Proulx left Vermont for the wide open spaces of Wyoming—a move that inspired several memorable short stories, including the O. Henry Award winner "Brokeback Mountain." First published in The New Yorker and included in the 1999 collection Close Range: Wyoming Stories, this tale of a doomed love affair between two Wyoming cowboys captured the public imagination when it was turned into an Oscar-winning 2005 film by director Ang Lee.
Lionized by most critics, Proulx is, nevertheless, not without her detractors. Indeed, her terse prose, eccentric characters, startling descriptions, and stylistic idiosyncrasies (run-on sentences followed by sentence fragments) are not the literary purist's cup of tea. But few writers can match her brilliance at manipulating language, evoking place and landscape, or weaving together an utterly mesmerizing story with style and grace.
Extras
• Proulx was the first woman to win the prestigious Pen/Faulkner Award. (From Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Powerful....[W]hat drives Mr. Proulx's people mainly is lust and lechery, itch and obsession....[R]ead [these stories] for their absolute authenticity, the sense they convey that you are beyond fact or fiction in a world that could not be any other way....Besides, you have little choice about reading [them] once you've begun them....bleak but expressive.
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt - The New York Times
Ms. Proulx writes with all the brutal beauty of one of her Wyoming snowstorms. Her people not only "stand" the bad luck and heartbreak that comes their way; they stare it down with astonishing strength.
Michael Knight - Wall Street Journal
Give yourself about 10 days to read this new collection of short stories by Annie Proulx. She has the mantle of American realism about her in style and vision, yet in this book she has broken new ground. It's a book with the best qualities of long-lasting, salty beef jerky. Some things shouldn't be rushed, but savored.
Steven C. Ballinger - The Bloomsbury Review
Annie Proulx's Close Range is the strongest attempt since Richars Ford's Rock Springs to capture a place that started as a fairy tale sold to gullible adventurers, flourished as a national matinee, and lives on as an existential broken promise that its people cant quite stop believing in...[Her] folksy stoicism isn't a pose. Her stories are solid oak...Her style is all substance, with very little air in it, as though she's learned to use fewer vowels, somehow, and banish articles and prepositions...At its best, Proulx's drawl is better than perfect....If God talked cowboy, he'd sound like Proulx. She's brilliant.
Walter Kirn - New York Magazine
Proulx hits and maintains a stunning narrative pitch whenever she details the Wyoming wilderness....[P]eople try their best against often insurmountable odds, but she imbues their efforts with a genuine sense of tragedy.
Book Magazine
A vigorous second collection from Proulx: eleven nicely varied stories set in the roughhewn wasteland that one narrator calls a "97,000-square-miles dog's breakfast of outside exploiters, Republican ranchers and scenery.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
The Half Skinned Steer
1. In the story told by Mero's old man's girlfriend, the half-skinned steer becomes a terrible fate Tin Head knows he can't escape. What is Mero's half-skinned steer? How was he marked by it and by his Wyoming origins? What is the nature of Mero's journey?
The Mud Below
2. What drives Diamond, raised in town and meant for better things, to make himself into a rodeo bull rider? Are rodeo performers real cowboys? Does not knowing who his father is force him to invent a persona for himself? What are his feelings toward his mother, his young brother?
3. Do you agree with Pake when he says that Diamond sees the bulls he rides as role models rather than opponents? What did Pake mean when he told Diamond, "you can't have a fence with only one post"?
4. A fleeting clue to the identity of Diamond's father is in the story "Pair a Spurs." Does knowing that identity change your perception of the impasse relationship between Diamond and his mother?
Job History
5. Does the title, "Job History" hold any irony? What do the jobs the members of this rural family hold tell us about their lives and opportunities? Do we learn more about them than the story's brevity and matter-of-fact style would suggest?
6. What does this story say about the power of the home place over us?
The Blood Bay
7. This story is a twist on an old folk tale, but here given a Wyoming setting and characters. What does Proulx's adaptation of this tale tell you about the collection as a whole? Are you supposed to read these stories as a literal reflection of life in the west?
People in Hell Just Want A Drink ofWater
8. Compare the Dunmires and the Tinsleys—each family's character and sensibilities, what each values, how they see the world, etc. What do their differences say about the error of stamping all rural people as similar in nature?
9. Ras Tinsley falls victim to brutal vigilante action at the hands of the Dunmires. The Dunmires are stockmen. Is what the Dunmires do to Ras justifiable from their point of view as stockmen in this time and place? How is castrating Ras similar to culling an inferior animal from a herd? What is the flaw in that logic? 10. Discuss the final line of this story.
The Bunchgrass Edge of the World
11. Ottaline feels trapped in a world that seems to have nothing to offer her, and finds escapes by listening in on other people's conversations on a scanner. Discuss the options women have in isolated rural areas. Low population density and lack of public transportation are two background factors in this story. What are others?
12. After the tractor begins to talk to her, Ottaline learns that an accident that killed a ranch hand was intentional—an effort, the tractor claims, committed to "save" Ottaline from the young man. Ottaline replies, "I could a saved myself, if I wanted to." Do you agree? Is that what she accomplishes later by marrying Flyby Amendinger? What places, or whose place, does Ottaline claim for herself?
13. As the story develops Old Red seems pushed to the sidelines, yet he is never silenced by advanced age or the marginalization of his role in the family. Were you surprised that Old Red, along with Ottaline, is a survivor in this story?
Pair a Spurs
14. This story concerns complex relationships between men and women in a small community and prompts questions on the nature of love. The magic spurs infect Scrope with a strange and inescapable obsession. How does his changed behavior affect the other characters? What do the spurs represent?
A Lonely Coast
15. The world does not lack for women like Josanna Skiles who accept bad treatment from the men in their lives. Why cannot Josanna break out of the pattern? She sometimes thinks that she lives in "a miserable place." Why doesn't she leave and make a new life for herself somewhere else? How does the place she lives in define her sense of self?
16. Josanna has close female friends, yet Palma throws herself at Josanna's boyfriend, Elk. Why don't these women have more respect for each other?
17. Did this story's depiction of contemporary small-town Wyoming surprise you? Do you think of drugs as a rural problem? What are the hungers, behaviors, and social factors that drive this story?
The Governors of Wyoming
18. Why did Shy, a lifelong rancher, get involved with Wade Walls when it meant betraying his own community? What is the significance of the man stumbling through the waist-high grass who grants Shy his evil wish?
19. In what ways do Shy and Wade represent fringe positions on the complex issue of cattlemen versus environmentalists? Which characters in the story do you think represent current contemporary Wyoming ranching practice? Why does Roany make a success of her business while Shy fails?
55 Miles to the Gas Pump
20. What does this story say about the role imagination can play in lives defined by a remote setting and repetitive work? How does this brief story illuminate the collection as a whole?
Brokeback Mountain
21. Both Ennis and Jack convince themselves that they aren't gay, and tell one another lies about the women in their lives. Is either man threatened by the other's relationships with women? Why is it so hard for Ennis to ask Jack if he was with other men in Mexico? How does Jack's disclosure affect their relationship?
22. How can Jack and Ennis—both gay men—be homophobic? Does it seem possible to you that the two men might ever have lived together in rural Wyoming the way Jack wanted? How important is Ennis's tie to place and a rural life in this story?
23. Discuss the symbolism of Jack placing Ennis' shirt inside his own on a hanger—and Ennis's reaction to finding them after Jack's death. Why did Jack and Ennis never go back to Brokeback Mountain after the first summer?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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